In the category of: Merry Christmas Vladimir…

Planning is underway for a “full” and “rapid” withdrawal of US troops from Syria, a US defense official told CNN Wednesday.

The decision, which would be a reversal from previously stated US policy, was made by President Donald Trump, who has long signaled his desire to get out of Syria, the official added.

On Wednesday morning, the President tweeted, “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

Even though the US will continue to maintain troops in Iraq with the capability of launching strikes into Syria, a US withdrawal of ground forces would fulfill a major goal of Syria, Iran and Russia and risks diminishing US influence in the region.

In the category of: Yet another bad day on the job for Rudy.

At this point, if both Trump and Giuliani were caught giving the nuclear codes to Russian operatives and the whole thing was lived streamed on Facebook, both men would look directly into the camera and say, “These codes weren’t even real, this is a witch hunt and a great big mess about nothing.”

Recently the president’s personal lawyer and overall fuckboy Rudolph “Dragon Teeth” Giuliani claimed Sunday that the Trump Tower in Russia was never really a thing.

“It was a real estate project. There was a letter of intent to go forward, but no one signed it,” Giuliani told CNN’s Dana Bash, Sunday.

Well, that turned out to be total bullshit because CNN’s Chris Cuomo got his hands on the signed letter of intent and wouldn’t you know it, the signature was from the one and only Donald J. Trump.

In the category of: Good to know, I guess…

Since 2010, the tech giant has reportedly granted over 150 companies deeper access to users’ personal data than it has admitted.’

Facebook reportedly gave some of the world’s largest tech companies access to users’ personal data, including allowing some firms to read and delete users’ private messages and obtain contact information through their friends, without users’ knowledge or consent.

The New York Times on Tuesday detailed how Facebook, through data-sharing “business partnerships,” shared and traded user data with more than 150 companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Yahoo and the Russian search engine Yandex.

These partnerships, the oldest of which dates to 2010 and all of which were active in 2017, “effectively exempt[ed] those business partners” from Facebook’s usual privacy rules, the Times reported, citing hundreds of pages of internal Facebook documents.